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Saturday, 10 June 2017

Agnieszka Holland is back
on the festival circuit, though she has long since moved away from the
Holocaust subjects for which they know her, doing series TV and versions of The Secret Garden (1993) and Washington Square (1997) - more familiar
when it was adapted as The Heiress
(William Wyler, 1949).

On the new film Spoor
she shares director credit with her daughter Kasia Adamik. It sets its tone
immediately with striking shots of deer antlers moving among the long grass at
dawn already suggesting nature as a mystic experience which is the way grey
haired lead Agnieszka Mandat-Grabka’s character sees it. Like her neighbors she
lives, with her adored dogs as companions, in an isolated home in the woods.
She chats to the wild boar that wanders into her yard and abuses a neighbor
whose wire snares are a cruel death for the forest deer caught looking round at
the audience. When Mandat-Grabka takes a lover it is naturally an
entomologist whose preoccupation is with the insects in the undergrowth here -
nice shot of blue beetles mating.

Her uneasy appointment as
local school English teacher is put at risk when she takes her charges on an
expedition into the dark trees looking for her missing pets. The local priest,
who is a cultural supporter of hunting, and the Polilja station cop who joins
the pack are reduced to close-ups of lips framing platitudes about animals
having no importance, no souls.

The only people who are
exempt from the lead and the film’s assessment as crude intruders into this
bucolic environment are the scrubbed up juveniles, an expelled city I.T.
technician and the girl sex slave of the local bogus playboy club. When bodies
start turning up in the woods they are the ones who become the suspects.

The first half of the film
is evocative and gripping. with the intriguing wild life straying through the
foliage and seen as targets by the hunt-and-drink lot who seem to be violating
the natural order, with the animal heads strewn about their houses, paralleling
the grotesque costumes of their seasonal celebration.

When the conventions of
the whodunnit assert themselves the film becomes less than it looked like it
was going to be. It’s still a well-crafted and played entertainment but it’s
also a disappointment. The cast and technicians are regulars in Slavonic movies
and the subdued colour palette recalls the bad old days of Commie colour Agfa
film processed locally.

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This is a blog devoted to things of interest to cinephiles. The subjects are randomly selected in the manner of a diary and are somewhat oriented to Sydney, Australia. In the past I used to send out these entries via regular emails but this has trailed off and its best to check here for anything new.You can contact me direct via email at filmalert101@gmail.com